By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 10 years ago

Chart of the Day: We’ve lost more than 50 abortion clinics in the last three years

According to a survey by the Huffington Post, at least 54 abortion clinics across 27 states have ended their abortion services or shut their doors entirely since 2010. The decline in abortion providers is nothing new; that’s been the trend since the number peaked in 1982. But this recent downturn is “so different from what’s happened in the past,” according to Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute. “This kind of change is incredibly dramatic.”

Check out the charts below to see how things look in your state.

map and timeline of clinic closings since 2010

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that, like the TRAP law that recently forced a 40-year-old clinic to shut down in Virginia, many of the closings were spurred by the many anti-choice state laws passed during this time. Others, like the sole remaining clinic in Mississippi, have only been spared because the courts stepped in.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

Read more about Maya

Join the Conversation